Just a short title, a little graphic if you wanted and some color (not demonstrated here.) This is about actual size which means the icon size strikes a good balance between too much/too little. This icon/button combo always worked for me. There’s something physical about the size and the presentation. You want to touch them.

If you bank with Wells Fargo you hopefully have seen the new(ish) ATM design using the modern-day equivalent of PacerForum buttons:

It’s finger-friendly, the controls are big, almost physical. Minimal amounts of info on the screen means less clutter and more focus. There’s some nice background on the project from one of the designers available too.

Frog’s Celltop project takes the big button concept and shrinks it for the mobile phone.

However this video overview probably does a better job of communicating how it works:

There’s always the danger of taking a perfectly good UI concept and shoehorning it awkwardly into a new environment. The PacerForum and Wells Fargo ATM design succeeded because of what they left out. Celltop took the button and made it a data-rich widget–dense with info and light on context. You no longer think about “touching” these things.

But touch is everywhere now. The iPhone still defines the experience with HTC (Android handsets), Blackberry and maybe even Palm coming up fast. Finger-friendly is only getting more important.

The people over jazzmutant.com have come up with a generic input device for controlling music and video apps, custom things, etc. etc. And it is totally multi-touch. You design the interface and you design how that interface controls your app. Meet the Lemur:

The videos are quite interesting, as is paging thru the manual (PDF).

Here’s an actual live use of a Lemur:

But its finally clicking with me. Twitter is an excellent “you to me” service. And the reasons why? The enforced brevity of each message and the simple controls for following/not following. Simple. Twitter wins over the traditional vendor email update subscription hands down.

Here are a few of my favorites.

amazonmp3 describes itself as “DRM-free Music Downloads from Amazon. Tweets on our Daily Deal and Friday 5.” Which means you get a tweet everyday that looks something like this:

8/20 Daily Deal: Smile by Brian Wilson. Everyday low price $9.99, today’s price $3.99. http://snurl.com/34×4m

All you have to do is click the url and buy.

99rental‘s bio is “Keeping you up-to-date on the weekly 99 cent movie rental on iTunes.” With a typical tweet looking like:

99¢ Movie: El Mariachi http://tinyurl.com/68b4h8

Again, simple, to the point, easy to act on.

Lastly, timoreilly is my personal Twitter aggregator. He “retweets” pertinent, useful and informative tweets from other folks using Twitter. A recent tweet:

Retweet @allennoren: A round-up of books about Darfur. If you don’t have time to read them, but want to know, read http://tinyurl.com/5zxp4z

Always fascinating how a service evolves. A lot can happen in two years. I’m not a prolific Twitter user by any means but I’m definitely benefiting from it.

“[Her] thesis is that organizations have their own kind of invisible structure. In other words, what you see on the flowchart of a company isn’t necessarily how the work gets done,” Carabetta explains. Stephenson uses surveys, data analysis, and elaborate charts to map out networks of relations that are often hidden.

There’re the usual sorts of findings:

“Evolutionary anthropologists always talk about a line of sight. You stand up on the savannas and you’ve got to be able to see great distances,” she says. “It’s the same thing here in the work space. You’ve got to be able to see out to others and see where it is you work, why you’re working there, and who it is you can interconnect and collaborate with.”

Plus some a little bit different:

The result is a layout based on relationships rather than hierarchies, with a design meant to foster interaction at all levels

That’s interesting. Which goes stale faster: a relationship or hierarchy? Depends on the job, the business, etc. etc. I suppose. Also, could this be the start of social network inspired architecture? Sign of the times but when I read “relationship” I immediately thought social networks. How awful.

Did it surprise me that the “recycling symbol” at the bottom of my yogurt container had nothing to do with its recyclability? Yes. (As it turns out, my city doesn’t take #5s.) So why was it there? My curiosity led to findings around which I built a design class. […] Our class is not about recycling per se. It is about understanding the systems we live in, finding the flaws and evaluating them. Our three Rs are research, rethink, redesign.

That last sentence lists the elements missing from the CF light adoption story. Treating them as “different” light bulbs isn’t working. The industry needs to rethink and redesign!

Meaney’s students came up with some interesting approaches to help folks make better decisions at the grocery store. These systems could work just as well for selling CF lights.

For instance, in-aisle education can come from stacking the shelves differently or displaying more information on the floor. (The original images aren’t that big; links just click through to the original piece.)

What about after purchasing your CF lights? You do know where your local recycler is right? No? Check out the handy list printed on your receipt. No excuses now.

It doesn’t have to be complicated.

It’s a list of things I enjoyed doing and wanted to spend more time doing: “Presentation, Conceptualizing, Communication: drawing, motion/video/animation, writing, Structure, architecture, env design” (Pretty certain I meant “environment” for “env”.)

Today, many years later, how much experience design fun am I having? Not enough! Hardly any video, no animation, very little drawing. Nothing but numbers buried in reports. It’s easy to blame the usual things: tight project schedules, disengaged clients, budgets, complacency, etc. Bah—lame. Really, there’s no good excuse.

Recently, in the design world there’s been a discussion regarding a research technique, the persona, and how they’re used and misused. For background read these: Persona Non Grata, Personas 99% Bad? and Personas are NOT a Document.

Couldn’t come at a better time for me. As I sit here fretting about research, along comes
Dave Robertson with all the answers. His article, “What would we do if they banned personas?“, laid it all out for me and presented a very clear direction. Ultimately, personas are a tool to communicate and whether you use them or not, you still need to communicate. That’s my problem! Communicating through reports isn’t particularly satisfying or effective.

Even though Dave’s article was really focused on persona use, my takeaway was a reminder of the truly inspirational communication tools available:

• Steal ideas from great creative briefs by our friends, the account planners who know how to talk to creatives and convey emotion
• Get a lot better at telling stories from the field research
• Create an animation or film that explains the customer and their needs
• Create a briefing that uses the video and audio recordings to impart key learnings
• Hold a workshop to convey and discuss the key findings with the team and our client
• Have real customers participate in ideation sessions to help brainstorm solutions
• Use other participatory design techniques like paper-prototyping
• Post large images of research participants, artifacts and environments on a wall in the work space with explanations of key learnings
• Post diagrams explaining the customers’ key processes or thinking patterns

Go read the whole thing; lots of wisdom in it.

David Schatsky, president of Jupiter Research one comment speaks volumes if we put it into context of the emerging market. He says “By paying closer attention to the tendencies of the end user, these sites will be able to evolve and meet the needs of a wider online audience.”

and

Individual allegiance moves away from portals, firms and toward networks and network platforms where individuals create collective affinities.

Explains the motivation behind new businesses like Satisfaction and their “people-powered customer service” idea. Aggregate the bottom-up efforts of an audience, harnessing their contributions (the Q&A, the social good vibes, the conversation, etc) and add a framework for pulling out ratings, reviews & answers for a company of interest. What you end up with, theoretically, is a better customer service experience than the company itself could provide. (As I understand it!)

My little epiphany: I think a firm’s success will come from it being able to act human enough to engage in those collective affinities.

Googling around, you’ll find many articles & books
discussing (usually) the film’s architecture and set design. You can read about “Tativille“, the modern metropolis built outside Paris for the filming and famous for being a grand masterpiece of architecture so expensive as to have bankrupted Tati and the production company. But there’s so much more to it than that….

Everytime I watch Playtime I get something else out of it. This last viewing left me impressed with all the poor product & environmental design Tati manufactured.

Screen grabs of some of the better examples:

This scene has an office security guy using the building’s intercom to announce a visitor. It’s a great example of obscure buttons, meaningless feedback, and needless complexity.

This scene shows a demonstration of a broom with headlights. It’s a fun scene: the demonstrator loads the batteries at the top, screws on the end piece with this ridiculously long little springy contact thing and then switches it on with a flourish. Great sound design too.

Here’s what happens when you design something without any consideration for the actual audience. The kitchen pass-through doesn’t actually fit the various serving platters.

More design in a vacuum. Notice the hanging adornments behind the bar, right at head level. The bartender can’t see his customers without ducking.

I don’t know why I like this one so much. The maitre d’ is always banging into the column, perfectly placed to be in the way. Also the entry isn’t wide enough for both the maitre d’ and guests to walk through so it’s always an awkward interaction.

If you look closely you can see the imprint of the chairs on the backs of the men’s suits. Nowadays maybe a Nintendo or Nike could get away with that, call it a guerilla marketing campaign, walk around with a logo on your back—it’s edgy!

The green neon cross beams it’s unappetizing glow over the food display. Who can decide what to eat? It all looks inedible and gross.

Thumbs up from me!

Q: Tesco is famous for doing a lot of customer research with it’s loyalty program, the Clubcard.

LEAHY: It’s an important technical part of an even more important philosophy, which is to listen to customers—but really listen. Many organizations say they listen, but they’re very selective in what they allow themselves to hear. The great thing about customers is that they’re very honest people.

Another interesting bit from Leahy:

“Our team went over to live in the U.S. We stayed in people’s homes. We went through their fridges. We did all our research, and we’re good at research.”

AA Gill over at the Times Online has a lot to say about the new Whole Foods recently opened in London:

“The largesse of this born-again, healthy, feel-my-freshness emporium exposes one of those great rifts between Americans and us. Americans like quantity. The sight of towering displays of fresh food, a carnage of meat, oceans of fish, a sugary cornucopia of buns and breads, and vast wheels of cheeses, fills them with a sense of wellbeing and comfort.”

And more from Lisa Armstrong’s piece:

“First, 80,000 sq ft looks thrilling when you walk in but it is simply too big. I couldn’t find anything on my list, partly because Whole Foods isn’t laid out like a traditional UK supermarket, and partly because products are arranged according to country of origin. And no, I don’t know where tahini comes from.”

The U.S. Tescos aren’t open yet but I’m looking forward to them. Will the reaction be as strong as the British with their Whole Foods?

No time to write up lengthy detailed reviews for them all so I’ll just relate a few initial impressions from the new.

In “Sketching User Experiences”, Buxton writes as if the confines of the printed page is too much to bear, both literally and figuratively. I’m a stickler for detail in book design and things like too long line lengths or screwy margins leave a horrible first impression. Maybe the 2nd edition will fix those problems.

There’s not a lot of summarizing going on. The synthesis is multi-layered & textured. You need to settle down with this book and take notes. It’s not always clear how (or why) he moves from point to point. Some concepts show up for a chapter or two and then they’re gone. Are we talking process? Strategy? Implementation? Unclear.

For example (just try to make sense of this), Buxton introduces the film making production team concept as applied to design (pg 78-80), skip a few chapters to the “design allows us to consider the future” concept (pg 207-215), then to the “vision and leadership” coda (pg 223-224). What is missing through this meandering journey is the thread of reinforcement!

Simple reinforcement goes a long way. In the first example he explains how a director/producer team acts as the vision & leadership for a creative product (the film) and yet in the last example he laments the lack of vision and leadership in design management. In between is some observation on how technology takes 20 years to take hold. Such strange ordering! And why not reference his previous chapter on film making? Give the reader a hint that it’s all going to come together!

Similar to “Designing Interactions” by Bill Moggridge, plenty of beautiful imagery fills the pages of Buxton’s book. I’ll never grow tired of looking at the creative work process. In fact, I find Buxton’s book reads best in an ad hoc fashion: pick it up and turn to any chapter and go. His anecdotes and stories are interesting; he’s an accomplished historian in the interaction design world.

So Buxton’s free design love leaving you a little woozy? Look to “User-centered Design Stories” for an abundance of structure & order. Think biz school case studies applied to design. This book and Buxton’s go well together actually—Buxton for the passion and spirit, UCD Stories for the rigor and analysis. A great pairing.

BONUS: Since we’re on the topic of user experience and books, here are a few more of my favorites:

The Conversations by Michael Ondaatje is a conversation between author Ondaatje and genius editor/sound designer/etc Walter Murch. I find Murch fascinating, especially his visual notation for editing.

Sketch Plan Build by Alejandro Bahamon shows off the visual thinking leading architects went through as they designed some of their more notable creations.

Travel back a century to San Francisco, it’s 1904, and A.P. Giannini has just raised $150,000 from friends and family to open the Bank of Italy. At a time when banks were for the wealthy and the businessman, his ideas for the Bank of Italy were radical. The great empathy he had for his clients meant the bank was going to be open on Saturdays. They accepted small deposits and let folks open accounts with little money. He gave home loans and extended credit to recent immigrants. He recognized an unmet need in his local community and designed a service to meet those needs. A classic “design thinking” story.

So pulling these two little anecdotes together, under Giannini, Bank of Italy begat Bancitaly Corp which turned into TransAmerica Corp which, in the 1950s, turned into Bank of America. It’s a bit difficult to wax poetic about a corporation worth around $600 billion but I certainly think the spirit of A.P. Giannini lives on in that Keep the Change program.